Shakespear's coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting
his pen with precision on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to
expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency. There was nothing
whatever to prevent Shakespear from being as decent as More was before
him, or Bunyan after him, and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney,
except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship
may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in
which insolence, derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt
contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the
pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois. No other class is
infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not made by a
very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are taught and coached
and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their part. But the
man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that view of
himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners,
into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a
lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer,
that he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he "had not the
advantage of a middle-class training." Shakespear himself tells us,
through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should
be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly
because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of
Shakespear's foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt
for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation
can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social
superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with
servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of Verona
and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great